Causality
by AngelDormais
Summary: Cody Jones is caught somewhere between the cause and the effect. He is the cause, and everyone else is the effect. .:In which a future creates a future from the blood of its past.:.


When Cody Jones is two, he's sitting on his mother's lap, clapping his hands and cooing in response to the book spread out on the floor in front of them. Her voice, a low stream of blurry noise that fills his ears like static, rises and falls as her finger trails across the text, sometimes tapping on a particular word, shuffling the pages, lifting to tuck back behind her ear the locks of blonde hair that tickle against his peach-fuzz scalp.

He doesn't understand what she's saying, or what the short, stout, multicolored blobs in the book that break up paragraphs of text are supposed to be, but they make his mom happy, and so he's happy.

—

When Cody Jones is six, he takes apart a holo-watch he got for his birthday and reassembles it in twenty minutes flat.

His mother, utilizing the magical sixth sense bestowed upon every woman that tells her when her child is up to no good, walks through the door about halfway through the process. She blinks at him in surprise when she sees him cross-legged on the sofa with a multitool in one hand and small gears and batteries laid out in neat piles across the cushions. He expects anger, because she's the one that had gotten it for him, but instead her face lights up and she strides over to ask him for the details of his project.

When he explains, she calls him a genius.

Rolling a screw between his thumb and forefinger, he asks feebly, "So you're not mad?"

"Of course not!" His mom laughs and reaches down to ruffle his scruffy red hair. "Uncle Don and Mom would be so proud if they saw you now."

Cody beams.

—

When Cody Jones is eight, he's attending his mother's funeral.

He feels warm and uncomfortable, wearing a suit that's too stiff on his limbs and a tie that's too tight around his throat, but all he really cares about is the metal casket being lowered into the ground with the assistance of low-propulsion pallbearers that have long since taken the place of their human predecessors.

His mom wanted to be buried in the long-preserved Central Park instead of the sizable and grandiose tomb his father and their side of the family is buried in. It's the same small, cordoned-off gravesite that he's visited with her twice a month for the last eight years of his life, only there are three graves now instead of two. His grandparents' tombstones are mossy and chipped, while his mother's is glossy and new, carved from shining marble that reflects the setting sun far too well for his liking.

It's a weird place for a burial site, and he doesn't really think he'd like it if he visited a park and came across some strangers' gravestones, but all he knows is that his family has a lot of money and that makes it okay.

Throughout the service, he keeps glancing towards the thicket of bushes in the distance, lying about twenty yards from his grandparents' (and now mother's) resting place. He remembers her, twice a month, pulling him through the dense underbrush, lifting him over stalks of twisting branches and roots until the foliage opened up into a small clearing with five markers; simple planks of wood with letters inscribed on them, creating a star shape with their placement. The very topmost marker had a walking stick jabbed into the loamy soil, and the other four had colored bands tied around each plank, and it was, to both Cody and his mother, the most sacred of sacred places.

When the eulogy ends, Cody takes a look around at the stuffy bureaucrats and CEOs and politicians to make sure none of them are watching. Once he's sure of it, he starts off towards the bushes to seek solitary comfort in the one place that belonged to him, his mother, and his grandparents, and no one else in the world.

Then a large, beefy hand clamps down on his tiny shoulder. He stiffens in surprise and turns to meet the wide mug of his uncle Darius Dun, who peers down at him through his monocle with a mixture of pity, irritation, and sickeningly-sweet politeness.

"I'm so very sorry about Shad—about your mother, young Cody," Darius says, his accent lilting the same way Cody's dad's did. Cody grimaces; his mom never liked Uncle Darius, and he doesn't either, even if he doesn't really know why. He looks to the ground, biting his lip and trying not to cry, because maybe if she were here she could tell him why.

"Of course, it now falls upon me to take charge of your upbringing," Darius continues as though discussing the weather. He keeps talking after that, but Cody isn't listening. Maybe he'll ask Serling when he gets home. Maybe Serling will know why.

(He does, of course. It's only shock. The young Master only needs time to adjust.)

—

When Cody Jones is still eight, the week after his mother's burial, he's lying in bed, watching through his acrylic-glass window for the blazes of neon light from hovercars speeding across the night sky, hugging a journal to his chest.

He doesn't know much about this journal, other than that his mother would sometimes read to him from it when he was a baby and that it contained stories about her and his grandparents and his mysterious great uncles. It was a different time when it was written, she'd once told him; things were difficult then, people were less open-minded. She'd explain it to him when he was older. Then the journal disappeared into her belongings, and he'd never seen it again.

Until three days ago, when Serling had tromped into his room and handed him the journal, stating that it was Ms. Jones' _unofficial _will that it be passed on to him. Cody is young, but he's sharp, and he spent the first two nights of its possession wondering why Serling had it, and why she'd never told him much about her life "before", and maybe most importantly, why she had an "_unofficial"_ will at all.

He doesn't know, but maybe this old, tattered book has the answers he seeks. He's the most afraid he's ever been in his life; but he thinks about his great uncles, shrouded in mystery and reverence, and his grandparents, political giants he's never met, and most of all, his mother, and how everyone thinks he's too dumb to notice that nobody's told him her cause of death.

So he cracks open the journal and reads by the city's nighttime glow.

—

When Cody Jones is twelve, he's obsessed.

His mother's family wasn't just cool, they were _heroes_. They quite literally saved the world, traveled to the far reaches of space, visited alternate dimensions, freed slaves, anything and everything, and in his great uncles' case, all for a world that reviled and feared them. He's old enough to understand that now; aliens didn't always walk along Earth's surface, and the things he's read about President Bishop's sketchy past sends chills down his spine. He thinks if they'd met him now, they would completely flip.

He cleans out an unused room of the penthouse and starts crafting his own personal museum of relics and souvenirs. Serling is agreeable at first; helps quite happily with the dusting, uses his large robotic arms to heft pedestals and display cases into place. But when Cody returns from a trip to Central Park with four bandanas sashed around his shoulder and a walking stick in both hands, his robotic companion suddenly takes a turn for the apprehensive.

"Sir, please don't tell me you got those from where I think you did," he pleads, his optics sliding out from his head in discernible concern.

Cody laughs him off, unties the bandanas one by one and tucks them into their display cases. "Stop being such a worrybot, Serling. Come on, the view from up here is way better than that gnarly old park clearing."

He punctuates the statement by swerving the display cases towards the window so that the masks gaze out into the city skyline, and Serling makes a noise of discomfort, but he ignores him. Serling's screws have always been wound too tight.

He tries to show the museum to Uncle Darius once or twice, but all the rotund man does is subtly curl a lip in distaste, pat Cody's head, and congratulate him on finding such a respectable hobby as artifact preservation before shuffling off to take care of O'Neil Tech business.

_That's Uncle Darius for you,_ he thinks fondly as he places the last, most precious artifact of all in an ornate glass-and-ivory case. The journal rises above the rest of the collection on the highest pedestal, overseeing all of the personified history written into its pages. _Always the sentimentalist._

—

When Cody Jones is fourteen, he gets an idea.

His favorite story had always been about his great uncles and their encounters with the Timestress Renet, a bumbling, airheaded girl who could manipulate the very fabric of time with her Time Scepter. She'd taken them one time into the past where prehistoric creatures roamed, and then another into a nexus of medieval sorcery to battle a fallen Time Lord.

The entry, which had been collaborated on between his grandmother's wide, cursive strokes and Uncle Don's compact and scratchy print, included much speculation on the Time Scepter itself. It had been a topic of fascination to them both, and the favorite theory is that it was an intricate mix of technology and magic, a product of an advanced realm tucked away far beyond time's reach.

Cody Jones knows little to nothing about magic. Technology, on the other hand…

No one with O'Neil _or_ Jones blood can resist a good challenge.

—

When Cody Jones is fifteen, he has the absolute time of his _life_.

It's hard to believe the turtles and rat he spends a year with are the same venerated individuals in that journal, the ones that saved planets and visited dimensions and hid from the world for their entire lives. They're all goofy, young, relaxed, and so very much _teenagers_ that he can't even bring himself to call them his uncles in his head anymore.

It's almost impossible to think that these five people jumped from the pages of his beloved journal right into his world to stand by his side, and even more so when he learns just how different they are from the war-hardened veterans he'd envisioned. It's easier, of course, when he learns the way adventure follows on their coattails wherever they go; with his assistance, they take down the uprising of Sh'Okanabo, purge a living virus from O'Neil Tech, and even expose Darius Dun for the cruel man he is.

It's more than he could have ever dreamed of.

—

When Cody Jones is still fifteen, the guys try to sneak a look at his precious journal.

He saw it coming a mile away and devises a plan to keep it safe from their eyes, but the very same night, as he's tucked into bed with the book in his lap, he pages past the photo of a celebration to the very last entry.

Said entry, which was written by his grandmother, details the night the guys were supposed to go to April and Casey's place to catch a movie—nothing special, but they had to make a stop to pick up Don from the junkyard where he was scavenging. Entirely unassuming; April was writing merely to jot down some of the project ideas she'd pitch to Donnie when he got there.

Not for the first time, Cody thumbs the journal page and frowns, wondering what happened to stop the entries there. It was near the very tail end of the book, so it seems most likely that April had just moved on to a new journal that must have been lost to time. It's a humongous shame; he'd have loved to have seen the details of their full lives chronicled.

Them's the breaks, he thinks as he snaps the journal shut and places it on his nightstand, reminding himself to hide it for the duration of the guys' stay.

He tries not to think about how much longer (or rather, shorter,) that might be.

—

When Cody Jones is sixteen, he says goodbye to the guys.

It's hard, but they'd had their fun, and it's time for them to return home. He bites his tongue on the temptation to beg them to stay forever. No matter how much he wants to, no matter how much brighter his life is with them here, and how lonely he'll be without them and without his mother and now without Uncle Darius, he has to let them go.

Maybe… maybe he'll see them again. It's just an idea. The time machine works properly now. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad to see them when they're younger, before they fought the Shredder, or maybe even before they'd met his grandparents. He can modify it again, make it the way it was originally supposed to be—just a window into another time.

The possibilities are endless.

But right now, he puts a smile on his face and waves goodbye as the five best friends he's ever known disappear into a swirl of light, out of his life, back into the pages from whence they came.

And then—right before the portal closes—Serling ambles forward with stiff, jerky movements, grabbing the sides of the time machine. Crying out in alarm, Cody darts forward to try and pull him away, but bolts of red electricity arc out from the portal and toss him backwards against the hard floor. The time portal whirs and groans, just barely audible over Serling's synthetic wailing, and then, before Cody can even comprehend what's happening, the machine explodes into thousands of fragments in a brilliant blast of scarlet light.

Within seconds, the light fades away and silence fills the room like a thick fog. Shaking like a leaf, Cody slowly stands up to a completely empty room caked in soot and gnarled metal chunks.

In the span of moments, everything has been turned upside-down.

"Guys? Serling?"

And then it shatters.

—

When Cody Jones is seventeen, he's in his lab, hunched over a desk and furiously scrawling notes onto white sheets of paper. Using computers is always well and good, but he likes working with physical pen and paper, likes the touch and feel of faint scratchiness against his fingertips.

_Just like your grandma,_ Mom's voice says in his head. _Gotta work with your hands._

He growls and reaches across his desk to slam his journal shut.

—

When Cody Jones is eighteen, he's of age to inherit O'Neil Tech and all of its properties, but he has little interest in any of it. Instead, he hires a few people to run it all and supplies them with paychecks wearing enough zeroes to make any greed-inspired betrayal seem redundant. As a failsafe, he appoints Starlee as the CEO—and when she complains that she doesn't have the training, he pays to put her through the appropriate courses.

He has better things to do.

_Sir, you haven't visited the graves of your mother and grandparents for quite some time—nor the hooligans', _Serling drawls into his ear; his synthesized voice still fades in and out with all the artificial inflections, even though Serling isn't here.

"I have better things to do, Serling," he says out loud. Waving a hand to dismiss the thought, he turns back to his notes.

—

Cody thinks he's probably still eighteen, but he hasn't checked his calendar for weeks, so it's not a sure estimate.

He has a theory. It's taken years, but he thinks he finally understands what went wrong, and why, no matter how hard he tries, no matter what he does, he can't get his rebuilt time machine to work the way he wants it to.

He wishes he could thank Donatello, really. If he and Don hadn't spent so many nights at the dining table with mugs of coffee in their hands, enthusiastically poring over schematics and new tech and old tech and everything in-between, Cody might have never gotten the proper insight into Don's theories about alternate timelines. He remembers it clear as day: Don's face lighting up, his arms gesturing in wide motions and pen flying across a sheet of paper as he detailed the idea of one universe existing along multiple timelines, and which one Don himself might have been from.

"It's possible we might not even be _your_ turtles," he'd once said as he thoughtfully chewed the tip of his pen.

Cody hadn't exactly been thrilled to entertain the idea at the time, but now it makes sense. The first time he'd pulled them into his lab, it had been a freak accident; the machine had been incapable of cherry-picking and thus swooped into whatever timeline it happened to be keyed into at that very moment. The second time around, when he'd sent them home, it had been a collaboration with Don himself, who'd done his best to help Cody sift through the endless junk data of the timestream and—presumably—pick out what patterns he thought had the best chances of corresponding to his own timeline.

Cody is struck by the misfortune that he'd never learned what patterns those happened to be. If only he knew, he could re-open the wormhole, at least _see_ what happened to the family he'd spent the most wonderful year of his life with. He doesn't know if they came back alive or dead; his precious journal is almost useless now that he has the knowledge that the turtles he knew may not have been his own. He didn't even know if Serling was still with them.

But now things are as clear as day, and Cody has a theory.

—

The portal's blue-and-white whirlpool of energy snaps and crackles, and moments later, Donatello bursts forth and crashes onto the ground in a heap, his duffel bag flying out of his hand to spill its contents onto the floor.

Cody pulls up the goggles from his eyes, his chest so full and throat so tight that he can barely breathe. With a cry of "Don!" he pushes away from the control panel and runs up to intercept his long-lost friend with open arms.

Then in a whirl of green and brown, he's jerking back with his chin tipped up, away from the end of a bo staff hovering inches from his throat. Cody's eyes dart to the portal as it closes, leaving the two of them utterly alone.

Uh-oh.

"Where am I?" Donatello asks, his voice hard. His gaze swerves across the penthouse laboratory, and then he adds in a tone acidic enough to burn, "And who are you?"

So it's true, Cody thinks. Or at least it's making a very strong argument. This Donatello doesn't know him, because it's _his_ Don: the real Donatello from the very same journal, not an approximation spawned from a mirror timeline.

Cody holds out his hands placatingly, showing he's unarmed. "Whoa there, Donnie. Just take it easy. I can explain everything." He slowly reaches into his pocket to hand Don a Graviton Regulator, but the instant Donatello catches the motion, he threateningly jabs the bo staff closer. Cody freezes. "I'm not going to hurt you, I swear."

"Keep your hands where I can see them," Don warns, his eyes narrowed into dangerous slits. "You don't need them to explain anything."

So carefully, slowly, Cody explains. He explains his time portal, the visit of the alternate-timeline turtles, how he used the parsing method he picked up from the other Don to scratch out the patterns that Cody believed made up his own timeline. He explains the catastrophic disappearance of the alternate turtles into the timestream, how he's been unable to access that particular timeline ever since, and how he could never live with himself if he didn't find out what happened to them.

"That's the long and short of it," he says finally. "I promise."

Don, who's stared at him this entire time with an admirable stoicism that would make Leo jealous, furrows his brow. "So if I'm understanding this correctly… you need me to help you pick out the data patterns of that alternate timeline? And just how do you expect me to do that?"

"I have your—his notes." Cody glances in the direction of a file cabinet, where the precious files lie safely in an encrypted folder. "It's crazy, but I keep thinking he must have written it down _somewhere_, left some kind of clue… it's not like him to ignore recording something like that. But the file is _massive_, and even after all this time, I still have no idea how his mind works."

Don grimaces as though smelling something foul. It's to be expected; Cody sounds desperate even to himself. But he has to try.

"And you think I do?"

"Well, yeah. You're...you. You're _him._" Cody can't help the slight wonder in his voice; frankly, he's baffled by Donatello's stark cynicism. The Don he knew had been gentle, patient, open to new concepts. Where exactly did this one come from in his timeline that he was more like...well, more like the hardened warriors that stalked across Cody's imagination so long ago?

In the long pause that follows, Cody's eyes trail to Donatello's quaking bo staff. By now, the turtle's whole body is trembling with the effort to stay upright in the lab's increased gravity field; even if he were to strike out against Cody now, he's not so sure Don would be able to do anything. The thought is at least a bit comforting.

"Okay," Don starts diplomatically, lowering his staff a few inches. He's panting with the effort to disguise his fatigue, but the ice in his eyes is all too sincere. "Let's say I believe you. Let's pretend for a moment that you know me, my brothers, my father, Casey and April, and almost every detail of my life because of _that_—" he jerks his head towards the closed journal on the control panel, "—and because you're April's grandson. Finally, let's say I believe that you need me here because you messed up the flow of time badly enough that you can't fix it on your own. Did I miss anything?"

Cody swallows. He's hardly made a dazzling first impression.

Donatello, however, only gives another calculating sweep of the laboratory, and then his posture straightens an inch. "Maybe I do believe you. And if you _are_ telling the truth, I can't just leave those alternate versions of us to fend for themselves." His eyes light up at the mention of his family's counterparts; it reminds Cody instantly of the Don with which he's more familiar, and it sends a thread of relief through his veins.

Daringly, he steps around to the side of the bo. "So you'll help me? Oh man, Donnie, you have no idea how much this—"

"One question, though." Don's staff finally loses the struggle with gravity and goes slamming into the metal floor, sending a loud clap through the laboratory. Chest heaving, he levels a gaze at Cody that's tinged around the sides with worry, and suddenly, even before Don speaks, Cody realizes why he's been so disagreeable up until now. "I understand why I'm here... but what about my brothers and Master Splinter? Where are they?"

Cody glances back at the closed portal, gritting his teeth at the truth of the answer. "I don't know."

"I beg your pardon_?_"

"I'm sorry," he says earnestly, instantly taking a step back at the tight flurry of emotions that flicker across Don's face. "It… it was keyed to your DNA, but it was supposed to grab everyone in a thirty-yard radius of the wormhole, not just you."

Quite honestly, he'd assumed the other turtles would come along for the ride too, just like last time. He could picture it all in his head right now—him and Don working late nights, becoming friends with the guys all over again, showing them a brand new world for the second time until they were able to get in contact with the other turtles and Serling. Everything was going to be okay again. Everything _had_ to be okay again.

"Thirty yards…" Don repeats slowly, like he's tasting the words in his mouth. His expression grows alarmed. "But I was at the… I wasn't anywhere near my brothers. Are you telling me they were left a century in the _past?_"

Cody feels the bottom drop out of his stomach. "I… I'm sorry. You guys are always together, so I just assumed—"

"But you can send me back, right?" Don's eyes dart sideways, and he's just barely keeping the anxiety out of his voice. He hesitates before adding, "Or—bring them here?"

Cody opens his mouth to say of course he can, don't worry, it was just an oversight—but then he tracks Don's gaze to the journal, and his insides go cold. In the next moment, his gaze snaps to the abandoned duffel bag, spilling bits of scrap and junk onto the cold metal floor.

No...no way.

In his mind, he's curled up in his mom's lap, or hugging a pillow against his chest with a holo-light, fingers pressed up against the final page of the journal. Shrouded in mystery, bits and pieces to fill in with his wild imaginings—what happened, he'd wondered, many, many times, to make the very last entry such an innocuous one?

"The junkyard," he whispers.

Don tenses up as though a huge predator had just passed by. "That's where I was before all this," he says. His gaze switches between Cody, the journal, and the duffel bag for several moments, and then his bo clatters to the floor as he takes a heavy, uncoordinated step forward to grasp Cody's arm. "What does that have to do with anything?"

_He was at the junkyard—_

_They were going to pick him up but—_

—_the journal ended._

Cody feels the blood drain from his face. Is it possible… is it possible he was never able to return Donatello home?

"Cody? What's wrong?" Don gives him an anxious squeeze, but his eyes dart back and forth, following Cody's lines of sight, and he knows he's putting together the pieces. "You said… you _did_ send me back eventually, didn't you? That journal… you said it kept records of our whole lives."

"No," Cody breathes without thinking. "Not all of it." He turns his head slowly, and his eyes are burning, his heart pounding in his chest, because he fiercely, desperately hopes that he hasn't just made the biggest mistake of his entire life. "Don… I think… we might have a problem."

Donatello goes very still. "What kind of problem?" Cody doesn't immediately answer, and then something drops like a lead weight behind Don's eyes, and he grips Cody's arm hard enough for it to hurt. "Cody, _please _tell me you're not saying what I think you're —"

"_No,"_ he bleats, reaching up and grabbing Don's wrist. He's not sure of anything yet. It's just a possibility. It's probably just a complete coincidence, and he wants to _shout_ these things into Don's face, but for some reason he can't get his brain and his mouth to sync up properly. "Look, I—the journal says you went missing, okay? And it never says whether or not you come back, but—"

Before he can blink, Donatello is gripping both of his arms, his eyes wide, whole body shaking with the effort of staying upright. His voice trembles faintly, like he's somewhere far away. "Send me back, Cody."

"I _can't,_" Cody moans, trying to jerk away, but Don's vice-grip is nearly bruising his skin. He's never seen Donatello panic, but he looks like he's imploding, and Cody can't _think_ of a reasonable explanation for all of this when he's being grabbed like this—

"_Defense systems activated."_

Both of them freeze at the smooth, mechanical voice that echoes through the lab. Suddenly a set of ceiling panels slam open and a mounted laser gun slides down into view, the barrel swiveling to pin the both of them in its crosshairs.

"Cody," Don says breathlessly.

No. No, no, no no no _no—_ "Deactivate! Override! _Don't!"_

But the call comes too late, and the defense systems have always been calibrated for hostage situations. The last thing Cody registers is Don looking back towards him, pinning him with the most fiercely _betrayed_ expression Cody has ever seen on anyone, and then there's an explosion of crackling electricity, Donatello's body jerking forward into his as it's silhouetted in a flash of light, and then one of the best friends he's ever known crumples to the ground in a bloody, burning heap.

—

"This is, like, still totally _not_ cute the quindecillionth time, okay?"

Cody blinks. When he looks around, he finds himself in a grand hall of polished marble and cobblestone, with bookshelves miles high stretching up into a white expanse of space in all directions, and he's wondering if he's asleep, because his brain feels heavy and there's a thin fog misting the air.

"Hey! Earth to Jones!" Fingers snap in front of his face, startling him to look at a woman wearing the weirdest helmet he's ever seen. She's frowning at him, and then with a roll of her eyes, she reaches out a hand and shoves him. He falls with a _whump_ into a Victorian-looking wooden chair that seems to materialize beneath him, and the woman sits down in an armchair with a dramatic sigh.

"Okay, well, let's just get this over with, I guess." She levels a distasteful glare at him. "You are in some serious trouble, Mister."

"What?" Cody says stupidly. He looks around again, but his gaze is invariably drawn back to the woman in her blue helmet and cape and strange little symbols dotted all over her armor. "Who are you? What's going on?"

She slaps a palm against her face. "Ho boy. You're even more clueless than usual. The last five times we did this you recognized me, like, right away,"

He what? Cody takes another look at this woman, but he's sure he's never seen her in his life, just like he's sure he has no idea what he's doing here. The little clock symbols on her armor… the kokards spiking out from the sides of her head with what look like little hourglasses on them—

Wait a minute.

Cody blanches, leaning back into his chair. "_Renet?_"

"There you go," she says. "Gold star or whatever. Can we get down to business now? Because Lord Simultaneous and me, we're like, _really tired_ of cleaning this mess up every time you make it."

"I don't understand," Cody says in wonderment. The last thing he remembers, he was sitting up with Don in the medbay, pumping him full of painkillers while the auto-docs tried to repair the severe damage to his shell. Don would have died from that energy blast in his own time, and even now it was still up in the air.

"Auugh! Okay, fine!" Renet starts counting off her fingers. "You make friends with the little green bald dudes from another timeline. That's fine, I totally get that! They're great! But then there's a mistake sending them home, and you waste, like, what—three years of your life trying to fix it? Only you bring back the Donnie from _your_ timeline, and then fry him into turtle flambee. Now you can't send him home because he's probably going to need your technology to survive for the rest of his life, and your timeline is like, completely falling apart. Capiche?"

Cody's throat goes dry. This is all too much to process. "Falling apart? How?"

"You removed Don from his time. And since you end up never sending him back, his time moves on without him. As far as anyone knew, he just completely disappeared." Renet sighs. "Usually it's not a big deal, but in this case, things went, like… bad. Really, really bad." Then she shudders quickly, as though hit by a cold draft. "Ohmigod. I don't even like to think about it."

This… it can't be real, can it? He has to be dreaming. Everything, the last four years of his life was just a big, horrible nightmare, and he'll wake up to the guys in his penthouse, using the furniture for training practice, driving Serling to short-circuit…

He wants to believe he's dreaming so very badly, but instead he simply asks, "What happens?"

"You don't want to know." Renet's voice turns hard, her blue eyes glazing over with ice, but there's a note of infinite sadness in them both. "Look, Cody, you might have totally screwed up, but you're not a bad kid. You _really_ don't want to see what happens."

"Yes, I do!" Cody shoots up from his chair, hands curling into fists. "This is all my fault, Renet! Please… please, just show me what I did wrong."

Renet mulls that over for a few moments. Then she looks away with a heavy sigh. "Would it kill you to just take my word for it just _once_?"

She stands suddenly, her blue cape sweeping behind her, and turns at a brisk walk down the corridor. "Come on then. But don't, like, say I didn't warn you."

—

"No. That can't be right."

Cody steps back from the time window as Renet closes it with a wave of her hand. His blood is howling in his ears, his tongue swollen like wool, vision blurring around the edges as though rejecting everything he'd just seen.

He leans against a golden carving of a dragon, trying to regain his balance.

Renet smiles mirthlessly. "Hate to say 'I told you so', but..."

"No, it _can't_ be right," he insists. He closes his mind against the flashing images of dark, red skies, smog belching from skyscrapers and that awful, horrible symbol emblazoned on every monitor, and his friends, all the blood, the graves, _no_. "It doesn't make sense. All of that would have happened under a century ago. We don't have anything like _that_ recorded in our history. And even all of the..." He swallows. "All of the deaths. They don't add up the same."

"Two words," Renet says gently, holding up her fingers for emphasis. "'Time Scepter'. Or, like, 'Lord Simultaneous'. Either one. While I'm busy here slapping you on the wrist, Simultaneous is off in your timeline, trying to put a giant band-aid on everything. But, like, even Time Lords have their limits. He can't just erase the deaths of the biggest players; he has to write new deaths for them instead. Again."

He wishes she'd stop that—stop talking like this is something he's done before, like there's an infinite loop of Codys pulling turtles from the wrong timelines, brutally injuring Donatellos, creating futures like _that _and learning that he's responsible for every single one of those sacred graves in Central Park. That can't be true.

He couldn't take it.

"Can't I fix it somehow?" He tangles a hand through his red hair. "I could—even if I can't send Don home, I could bring the rest of the guys to _us_, right?"

Renet frowns. "Like, what is wrong with you? Haven't you been paying attention? If you take someone out of their time, they're gone. As bad as the future you made was, just think about what it would be like if _none_ of them were there."

"But I—maybe if Don gets better, I _could_ send him back—"

"No." Renet takes a step forward and looks down at him with burning eyes. "Listen, okay? Even Lord Simultaneous can only do so much. Your timeline is, like, barely holding together, even after we fix it—we actually had pull in some help from one of your different timelines just to get it working the first time. If you stick your nose in the time stream ever again, it could just fall apart, and then there's nothing either of us could do. It's over, Cody."

Renet trails off, and then with another wave of her hand, the world disappears around him, the stretching bookshelves and marble floors and carved dragon statue, and he has the sensation that he's falling.

"I'm sorry," he hears someone say, and he's not sure if it's Renet's voice or his own, but then he hits the ground and blacks out either way.

—

"So I can never leave."

Propped up in bed, eyes angled low to avoid the dim light shining overhead, Don idly thumbs the cybernetics in his arm.

"I'm so sorry, Don." Cody leans forward in his chair and buries his face. "This is all my fault. All of it."

Donatello makes a noncommittal sound that is neither disagreement nor forgiveness. They lapse into silence, listening to the rhythmic bleating of the monitoring equipment that fills the air.

Don's gaze shoots towards him. "And… what about the alternate timeline versions of us?"

"I don't know," Cody admits. He'll never know. He knows too much of everything now, and he'll never know the only thing he ever set out to learn.

Don turns his head away. And that's the end of that.

They sit in silence for a minute, an hour, maybe more. What can Cody say? Would any amount of apologies ever make a difference? Could he promise to fill the brother-shaped tears in Don's soul with any material thing he could ever want? All of the futuristic tech in the galaxy. All the money and power he would ever need to create things from his wildest dreams. The highest position in O'Neil Tech he could ever ask for.

He knows the answer, and he knows that even entertaining the idea of anything else is foolish; and so eventually, without a word, Cody gets up and heads for the door.

"The Donatello you knew before…"

The voice freezes him in his tracks, and then Cody slowly turns back to Donatello, who's staring him down from his nest of pillows and bandages and cybernetics with the darkest, most anguished eyes Cody has ever seen. "...and me and you. It won't ever be the same. Not after this."

Cody smiles thinly. "It never was."

The light clicks off, leaving Donatello in the gentle glow of the monitor screens, and Cody disappears through the doorway.

—

_a/n: on tumblr there's a fandom joke that cody jones caused sainw. why? well, because we don't like him._

_but what if he actually had?_


End file.
